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The 8th President of the University of Pennsylvania, serving since 2004, Amy Gutmann is an internationally renowned leader in higher education: a prominent advocate for increased access to higher education, for innovation based on interdisciplinary collaboration, and for the transformative impact of universities, locally, nationally and globally. In November 2016, Penn announced that President Gutmann’s contract had been extended to 2022, making her the longest-serving president in Penn’s history.

In her 2004 inaugural address, President Gutmann outlined a bold and ambitious vision for the University: the Penn Compact. Penn’s commitment to the three core values of the Penn Compact — Inclusion, Innovation, and Impact — has propelled the University forward during an era of dramatic change.

Inclusion

Penn's all-grant policy for undergraduate financial aid, based on need, is the largest in the country and serves as the cornerstone for inclusion efforts. Penn has provided students and their families with more than $1.4 billion in grants since its implementation in 2009. The average cost for aided students to attend Penn today is almost $2,300 less than it was in 2005. A first-generation, low-income college student herself, President Gutmann has more than doubled the number of students from low-income, middle-income, and first-generation college families attending Penn.

Innovation

President Gutmann has led the creation of an innovation ecosystem on Penn’s vibrantly expanded campus, which brings together researchers, innovators, and entrepreneurs to move research discoveries into the marketplace. The Penn Center for Innovation, opened in 2014, fast-tracks Penn discoveries and technologies to meet social needs. Officially opened in 2016, Pennovation Works is a 23-acre former heavy industrial site that the University purchased and transformed into an innovation campus close to its academic core. The Pennovation Center is Pennovation Works’ flagship business incubator and laboratory.

Impact

Transformative initiatives also underscore Penn’s impact on its community, society and world. These include the expansion of civic-minded partnerships with Philadelphia public schools such as the model, University-assisted Penn Alexander School, which won coveted National Blue Ribbon status in 2016, and strong programmatic support for hundreds of other local public schools. On the global front, the fall 2016 opening of the Perry World House on campus and the spring 2015 opening of the Penn Wharton China Center in Beijing mark the launching of major new sites for university-wide initiatives that promote global solutions to challenging problems, and bring the world to Penn and Penn to the world. Most recently, in 2017, Penn announced that Vice President Joseph R. Biden would lead the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington.

To ensure the future of these and many other major initiatives, Dr. Gutmann has raised more than $5 billion for Penn and led the largest, most successful fundraising effort in the University's history, a $4.3 billion Making History campaign that concluded in 2012, exceeding its ambitious goal by almost a billion dollars. While more than doubling financial aid and adding more than 200 endowed faculty professorships under her presidency, Penn has combined expertise and prudence in managing its expenses and investing its endowment. Penn's endowment has more than doubled over the course of Gutmann's presidency.

A leader in interdisciplinary research and education, Penn created the Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) University Professorships, a unique university professorship program that brings preeminent faculty to Penn from around the world. PIK university professors hold joint appointments in two or more of Penn's 12 schools. Penn has also distinguished Itself with the widest range of new interdisciplinary majors, research and teaching programs, academically based service learning courses, and massively open online courses (MOOCs) that span Penn's 12 schools.

President Gutmann also has pushed Penn to the forefront in civic engagement by converting an abandoned parking lot into Penn Park, a 24-acre urban oasis opened in 2011 that connects Penn’s campus to the center of Philadelphia. Design Philadelphia called Penn Park an "urban sanctuary" in the city.

President Gutmann is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School for Communication, with secondary faculty appointments in Philosophy in the School of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School of Education. She has published widely on the value of education and deliberation in democracy, on the importance of access to higher education and health care, on "the good, the bad and the ugly" of identity politics, and on the essential role of ethics—especially professional and political ethics—in public affairs.

Gutmann continues her pathbreaking scholarship as Penn's President, publishing her sixteenth book, The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It (with Dennis Thompson) in 2012. Judy Woodruff of the PBS Newshour called the book "a clear-eyed examination of the forces that bring warring political leaders together or keep them apart. I wish every policymaker would read it.”

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Appointed in 2009 by President Barack Obama, she chaired the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues for seven years and published 10 reports on major issues including pediatric vaccine testing, privacy and progress in whole genome sequencing, protecting participants in human subjects research, and preventing and responding to public health crises such as Ebola and Zika.

She was elected and served as Chair of the Association of American Universities (AAU) in 2014-2015. She served on the National Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, and she currently serves on the Boards of the National Constitution Center and the Vanguard Group. She is also a member of the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Berggruen Institute.

Dr. Gutmann has been honored with the Harvard University Centennial Medal (2003), the Carnegie Corporation Academic Leadership Award (2009), was named one of the "150 Women Who Shake the World" by Newsweek (2011), and received the Anti-Defamation League’s Americanism Award (2014) and the Urban Affairs Coalition’s Doer Award (2015), the Lucretia Mott Award from Women’s Way (2017), and was named one of Fortune’s ‘World’s 50 Greatest Leaders’ (2018). She is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, and is W.E.B. DuBois Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She previously served as President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. Dr. Gutmann is a founding member of the Global Colloquium of University Presidents, an advisory group to the Secretary General of the United Nations. She has received numerous honorary degrees, including a Doctor of Humane Letters from Johns Hopkins University (2017), Doctor of Laws from Columbia University (2012), and was named an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics (2013).

As the leader of Philadelphia's largest private employer, Dr. Gutmann heads one of the Commonwealth's most powerful economic engines, with an estimated total economic impact of $14 billion annually in Pennsylvania. As part of that impact, the University has made substantial and far-reaching investments in its own physical infrastructure. Penn's campus master plan, Penn Connects, has resulted in a $2.7 billion investment that has added 5 million square feet of developed space to campus since 2006, with plans for $2 billion additional investment in 1.8 million square feet of space. At the same time, open space on campus has increased by 25 percent.

In addition to those noted above, selected highlights of President Gutmann’s tenure at Penn include:

Undergraduate applications have grown from 18,282 to nearly 40,000 for the Class of 2021.

The undergraduate financial aid budget has grown by 167%– from $84 million to $224 million. The average grant for undergraduate students receiving aid in FY2018 is $47,046.

The creation of a state-of-the-art Penn Medicine complex, which fully integrates basic and translational research with patient care, and has grown to include major new facilities (Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine, Roberts Proton Center, Smilow Translational Research Center), Chester County Hospital and Lancaster General Hospital, and new physician offices and outpatient facilities across Philadelphia, southwestern Pennsylvania, and southern New Jersey.

Prior to her appointment at Penn, Dr. Gutmann served as Provost at Princeton University, where she also was the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics. She was the Founding Director of the University Center for Human Values, an eminent, multidisciplinary center that supports teaching, scholarship and public discussion of ethics and human values. Also at Princeton, she served as Dean of the Faculty and as Academic Advisor to the President, and was awarded the President's Distinguished Teaching Award.

Dr. Gutmann graduated magna cum laude from Harvard-Radcliffe College. She earned her master's degree in Political Science from the London School of Economics and her doctorate in Political Science from Harvard University. She is married to Michael W. Doyle, the Harold Brown Professor of Law and International Affairs at Columbia University.